Bridging the Gap
by AshenMoon42
Summary: Minerva looked at Sirius, at this wreck of a man, and wondered where her boy had gone.


**Art is natello's. **

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**International Wizarding Schools Championship Round 4**

**School and Theme: Beauxbatons / / Hagrid's Hut - a character living on the edge of society (Sirius)**

**Main Prompt: [genre] hurt/comfort**

**Additional Prompts: **

**[action] searching**

**[dialogue] "That cat looks very suspicious." / "You say that about every cat you come across." **

**Year: 7**

**(Please note that [action] searching is used in a metaphorical way. McGonagall, you may notice, is searching for the boy she once knew inside the Sirius Black she is speaking to.)**

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**Reviews Corner Valentine's Ball**

**Prompt: Volto / / [dialogue] "Do you have a minute?" (asks the one person you were **

**trying to avoid).**

**It's not really romance … at all. Oops? You could content yourself with shipping McGonagall and Sirius, if you'd like, but it's a bit of a stretch.**

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**Slight AU-ness: In the books, McGonagall doesn't know Sirius is innocent until Dumbledore tells the Order in the summer after Harry's fourth year. Here, he has already told her. I just really wanted to write this. **

**Wordcount: 2103**

**BRIDGING THE GAP**

* * *

Minerva opened her office door just a crack, peering out and only exiting once she had confirmed that the corridor was devoid of anyone who could stop her. She walked down the hall at a slightly faster pace than usual, glaring at misbehaving students rather than stopping to reprimand them and ignoring staff members as if she had somewhere dreadfully important to be. Which was true, not that they could know about it.

She had managed to pass through several corridors uninterrupted, but it was as she reached the front entrance that a voice came drifting from behind her.

"Minerva! Do you have a minute?" a small voice squeaked.

She sped up a little, as if she hadn't heard, hoping that the caller would walk in the opposite direction and find someone else to nag.

The voice persevered. "Minerva! Gosh, you're walking awfully fast today, aren't you?" Could she pull off one more burst of speed? "Minerva!"

This time she turned as if she'd only just heard and plastered a bright smile on her face. "Yes? What is it, Filius?"

"Could you help me with some marking? I have a seventh year who doesn't understand conjuring, and I can't quite explain it to them right. Do you think—"

"I'll see you tonight about it, or you can ask someone else. I'm afraid I have a very important meeting in Hogsmeade which I am late for."

"Of course, Minerva. Sorry to have kept you. Do enjoy your meeting!" The last sentence was close to a yell because Minerva was already halfway out the door.

It was spring, and the road to Hogsmeade was lined with blooming flowers and new grass. The brightness of the sun made the air no less brisk (it was Scotland, after all), and she pulled a scarf tight around her neck to block out the wind. Even once she was off the grounds of Hogwarts, she couldn't quite bring herself to Apparate. The task was one that required walking, she decided, so walk she did.

It wasn't far, and whatever her old legs were lacking, her eagerness made up for, and she arrived in good time at the bottom of a hill. She was just past Hogsmeade at this point, at the threshold between the village and the wilderness. She'd have to scramble up some gravel to reach the top, so she transformed swiftly into a cat and leapt from rock to rock with ease. At the top was a cave, and as a cat, she could fit easily through the narrow entrance, but before entering, she hesitated. She wasn't sure why, exactly, but she had to steel herself before going in.

Inside was a man and a Hippogriff.

It had been so long. She wondered as she looked over him whether there was anything left worth knowing.

The man was ragged, like a scarecrow with the stuffing ripped out. His eyes were sunk into craters, and his cheeks were hollow, his hair hanging around his face in a state Minerva would never have imagined fourteen years ago. He wore robes stained and ripped and hanging from his thin frame, but his grey irises still glittered with wit.

"That cat," the man murmured to the Hippogriff beside him, "looks very suspicious."

Minerva transformed and stood before him, unable to prevent the smile stretching across her face. "I daresay you say that about every cat you come across, Mr Black."

Sirius stood with a grin. "What can I say? Cats are dodgy, Professor."

She suddenly didn't know what to do with her hands. Half of her wanted to hit him and the other to envelop him in a bone-crushing hug.

He frowned at her. "What's wrong?"

She laughed and was unsurprised to feel tears building in the corners of her eyes. "Mr Black..."

"I'm not your student anymore, Professor."

"Sirius, then." Even during the war, she had never let herself use his first name. In the years that had followed, it had always been 'Sirius Black', as if she didn't know him well enough to call him anything but the full name. Even thinking of those years made her immediately lurch towards her ex-student.

When she hugged him, his form was made of sharp angles like glass shattered and magicked back together at all the wrong places. She wrapped her arms around him and thought of the child she had given detentions to whilst suppressing laughter, the child who had bantered with her during said detentions, the child who had cried in her office after his parents had thrown him out.

How had that child turned into this? His face had been elegant touches and his eyes made of laughter. Now he was hollow and jagged and alight with a darker kind of humour.

That child, now a man living in a cave at the edge of the village, surviving off scraps.

"You poor boy," she whispered.

He laughed, and his body rattled. The action was clearly unfamiliar to him. She was worried he might fall apart. "I'm not a boy anymore, Professor."

"I'm not your professor anymore."

"I'm not a boy anymore, _Minnie_."

She pulled away and searched his face for a trace of boyhood. "No," she said. "I suppose you aren't. _Padfoot._"

He choked. "Forgot you knew that."

"Yes," she said as she peered about the cave. "And I certainly didn't realise in your fifth year, either, when you earned a new nickname at the same time as I started noticing a dog wandering the corridors and grounds." As he laughed again, she added, "And a stag and a rat, too. Prongs and Wormtail, I presume?"

"Yes."

"And Remus is Moony."

There was an awkward silence as she searched for a place to sit, finally accepting the cave floor and sitting uncomfortably on the rocks, with her frail limbs folded and her skirts piled beneath her.

"I should've said something," Sirius said very quietly as he sat down without the same care.

Minerva looked at him to see his grey eyes focused somewhere a foot to her left, as if she wasn't there at all.

"Then Peter would've been found years ago. I let myself be arrested. Thought I deserved it."

"No innocent man deserves that."

He gave a bitter laugh. "I did not see myself as innocent. I had betrayed the Potters in my own way by telling them to choose Peter. By giving their lives to that rat. And I betrayed Remus, of course, by thinking him the traitor, for not trusting everything the two of us had. I was stupid."

"It was not your fault."

"I know. Deep, deep down, I think I know that, and being arrested made it worse, but for now, I'll live with this guilt."

"You shouldn't have to."

He looked down, hair falling over his face.

She shifted, frowning to herself. "I'll admit my own guilt to you now, Sirius. I … I misjudged you."

He was silent and still. Eerily still in a way he had never been at school, as if he was a doll, or had suddenly died, lying against the cave wall.

"I thought you to be the spy. I never doubted it. All these years, I never thought to visit you or wonder about the lack of a trial or … or anything. I let it be true instead of challenging it. I wanted it to be all over, for there to be a simple explanation, for the war to have ended forever, for the guilty to be locked away forever. I don't think I could've even looked at you, right after. Because once they told me what you supposedly did, that was it. The thought was planted. The hatred began, and I would never be able to shake it off."

She imagined him in Azkaban, lying against the bars like he was now, his life drained out of him except for those eyes. Those storm cloud eyes lined with pain. She could search for happiness inside those eyes for hours and find nothing at all.

"It's … I needed someone to blame, and Pettigrew was dead beyond doubt—or so we thought—and you were there. You were sent off, so the work was already done, and I had no reason to oppose that. I wanted an end, and your arrest brought that."

She closed her eyes in guilt and pain, trying to express this right. This was one conversation that could not go awry.

"What I'm trying to say, Mr Black, is … I'm sorry. I'm not one for apologies, but I am truly sorry. We all are."

"Dumbledore didn't seem too sorry."

"He struggles, sometimes. With seeing real people beyond his obsession with the Greater Good."

Sirius scoffed. "Dumbledore and his bloody Greater Good. When will it end? Harry is … he needs to be protected. He can't be used like we were."

"I will not let Harry be thrown away, Sirius. You have no need to worry about that."

"You'll tell me about him, won't you? Please, just … keep me updated."

"I will."

Buckbeak squawked from the corner, and the two of them flinched and turned at the same time before breathing identical sighs of relief.

"He's hungry," Sirius commented.

"That reminds me," Minerva said, bringing a bag out from her cloak. "This should last you a while. The charms will hold for a month, at least."

By his shaking hands and jerky, unsure movements, Sirius was clearly being careful not to snatch it towards himself, but when he opened the bag, he breathed in the aroma of Hogwarts foods greedily and lobbed a drumstick to Buckbeak, who seized it out of the air and swallowed it in one.

It was sad to watch the once-graceful man eat the food like it was the only thing that mattered. In minutes, he had eaten an entire plate, and he flopped back down with a satisfied grunt. "Thank you," he said.

"You're quite welcome. Your stomach was always a bottomless pit at school, as I recall."

He laughed again, but it lacked life. "My appetite rages when I haven't eaten but burns out rather quickly, I'm afraid. My stomach has gained a bottom, and it's not a deep one."

"Well, Remus was the real eater, wasn't he? On the new moon, I seem to recall watching him eat four servings of roast!"

"Oh, of course. Though on the full he'd eat nothing but rare steak, which was rarely on the menu."

"Apart from that time when every vegetable on the Gryffindor table was replaced with juicy steaks. Was that one of yours?"

"James's, actually. Third year, right? Merlin, did he hate asparagus."

She laughed and found herself brought back to when those four boys had wreaked waves of glorious havoc upon their heads. They'd pranked, and they'd joked, and they'd been so, so happy.

Minerva looked at Sirius's grinning face, and her smile faded a little. He looked like a skeleton, albeit a happy one, at least. She was glad she had decided to visit.

They spoke about Harry and about Remus and James and Lily. He started to cry, ashamed, and she immediately followed suit. She was still wiping away tears on the path back to Hogwarts, and when she seated herself in her office, she promised herself she would visit Sirius again soon, however much it pained her to see his broken figure, however often she found herself trying to find any remnant of his former self. Because beyond the rags, he was still one of her Gryffindors, and that was one thing that would never change.


End file.
